Wednesday 27 May 2009, 8.30 am to 5pm It is now 30 years since the Working Women’s Charter was adopted by the Federation of Labour Conference as policy It had an immediate effect on conditions of work for women and on women’s participation in unions.

There is a sort of hungover decadence to much of the key music from 1968 Instead, the music of 1968 had more in common with the frustrated rage of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and with the tragic, pissed-off sense of inevitability with which the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were greeted that year.

The Nil Wage Order has been described as a watershed in NZ industrial relations and an event which marked the death knell of the arbitration system. The significance of the Nil Order is the subject of my presentation this afternoon.